by: A. Hindi
Journal
Notes on governance, home, and the work in between
Essays and field notes drawn from two decades of humanitarian, policy, governance and nation building in Somalia and Canada.
October 25, 2026
Turkey’s growing role on Somalia’s coast is an opening for the North East State, if it arrives with projects investors can actually fund.
October 19, 2026
Netanyahu's new security doctrine came with a map that gave each piece of Somalia a patron. The North East State sits between the regions painted blue, and it chose Somalia.
October 11, 2026
A short story. Khatumo's politics as a football match with no referee and no goal posts, until someone takes a seat behind the narrator for the second half.
October 5, 2026
Outside Las'anod, young men back from the fuel trade are farming ground every map calls desert. No donor funded it, and no workshop taught it.
September 16, 2026
At the Hudson Institute the North Eastern State was waved off as a formality and 2023 was called a conflict. Both words deserve an answer.
September 16, 2026
The mag, or diya, system spreads the cost of harm across a whole kin group. Social insurance, built by nomads long before the term existed in any funding proposal.
September 14, 2026
Fifty-plus episodes of the CultureLink radio show I co-hosted with Glen on Met Radio 1280 AM, now archived here in full.
September 13, 2026
This year's appeal measures the outside money that is missing, never the local capacity that was already there and unfunded.
August 27, 2026
As U.S. funding for AUSSOM ends, Las'anod's self-driven rebuild shows what real ownership actually looks like.
August 15, 2026
A conversation with the UN's senior humanitarian official for Somalia in Jowhar, ahead of his expected first visit to Laascaanood and the Northeastern State.
August 15, 2026
On charting our own direction: from the frontier near Buuhoodle to the port at Laas Qoray.
August 14, 2026
On the Cali Barre Mosque rising over Laascaanood, and what a single building can mean for a region still rebuilding.
Why I'm starting this, and what to expect here.
A first sketch of an argument I keep coming back to: why development led from outside rarely outlasts the funding.
From the archive
Before this journal there was a publication. 132 entries recovered from the Internet Archive, covering the formation of Khaatumo State, the Somaliland question, and the contested territories around Las Anod and Buhodle — reproduced as originally published.
Browse the archive →